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Les Causeries du Jeudi
A Stanislas Noria seminar

Science is a social activity. It cannot be
singled out from other human activities, although it has its own
rationality. The aim of the Causeries du Jeudi (Thursday's chats) is
to bring together scientists, laymen, artists, lawyers, poets,
philosophers, who feel concerned by problems raised by biological
knowledge (and in general human knowledge) for discussions on the
chief concepts that make Biology as we now know it.

This seminar runs under the collective name
Stanislas Noria (唐戽水車 ). In the mid-1980s, when whole genome
sequencing programs were implemented, Artificial Intelligence research
(popularized by Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach,
published in 1979) was in full swing. We chose in 1989 the name
Stanislas Noria, the acronym for Total Nucleic Acid Sequencing (STAN
in French) New Orientation of Research in Artificial Intelligence
(NORIA in French), to illustrate our participation in this effort in
the domain of biology.

Because language becomes critical when one departs strictly from the
most esoteric science, our discussions use several tongues. Started in
French in the early nineties, they are now held mostly in English
(sometimes in Cantonese!, when held in Hong Kong), but some
discussions still go on in French. It should be remembered here that,
in contrast to Anglo-American cultures, Latin civilisations
(especially in Italy and Portugal, but in France also) do not split
between Science, Arts and Literature (see CP Snow, The
Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution). It is
therefore natural that any ongoing reflection of the very basis of
Science (which is deeply rooted in language, and therefore in
semantics, see Keith Chen for a fairly
extreme but documented view) is pursued not only in English, but
in other languages as well. It should be remembered that the 2000
Nobel Prize winner in Literature Gao Xingjian 高行健, writes not only in
Chinese, but also in French... Whereas radical empiricism fits well
with English (facts first, demonstration later), the basis of what
makes Science (a kind of rational thinking build on hypotheses and
deductions) is hypothesis-driven, and in this endeavour languages such
as French, Greek or Italian (and in its own special way, German) may
appear to be much more appropriate. The case of Chinese is very
original there, and has to be entirely re-constructed, from the
holistic point of view which is its own native feature. This is one of
the endeavours of the Causeries.

These causeries are a revival of the discussions of the Centre
Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, initiated in the early
seventies mostly by Jacques Monod. This Centre unfortunately
disappeared after Monod's untimely death. This took place at the time
of the destruction, in most Western countries where it still existed,
of an education system based on Humanities. For this reason it became
incongruous, if not plainly obscene, to speak of philosophy (or
poetry) inside a "hard-science" laboratory. However, in the early
nineties, there was a first hint that young scientists became
interested again in the reasons underlying their own endeavours. This
is what prompted the organisation of a weekly meeting in the
Regulation of Gene Expression Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris,
where people interested in the nature of Science would come and
discuss general issues. This was at a time when a programme with
Chinese Universities, as well as the University of Bologna in Italy,
were experimenting an unorthodox exploration
of anthropological studies of the West by Non-Westerners. For
two years, the discussion was centered on a presentation of the Presocratic
Philosophers, starting with the observation that the quotation
of Democritus which made the title of the famous book of Jacques
Monod, Chance and Necessity, was
apocryphous, and entirely foreign to the Greek spirit.
Subsequently, the major theme of the Causeries was the concept of function.
The discussion was initiated by Yves Brette, a former manager of the
Bull Company, who spoke about the nature of the functions of human
artefacts. From then on the discussion focused on many topics, ranging
from Aristotelian philosophy, Cassirer, Leibniz, to concrete issues in
functional genomics, and genome annotation. At the onset of the
founding of the HKU-Pasteur
Centre the discussion was moved to Hong Kong, where it began
with a discussion about the nature of Science and knowledge in Europe
and in Eastern countries.

During years 2001-2002 and until march 2003, the causeries were held
at the Department of Mathematics of
the University of Hong Kong, as Working Seminar - Conceptualized
Biology: first steps to define what life is (2nd Series -
2002-2003). They started again at the Institut Pasteur in october
2003. In Paris, this working seminar was temporarily interrupted.
Several ongoing efforts were nevertheless developing in parallel: the
conference Le Logique et le Biologique held at the University Paris I
on april 22nd 2005 is an illustration (summarized in our presentation).
Since 2006 the discussions have resumed a more regular course, with
conferences, seminars and discussions in Paris and in Hong Kong. A
central focus at the time is Symplectic
(Synthetic) Biology. This work was followed up by the creation
of an open access journal, Symplectic Biology. This journal failed to
develop in a context where Open Access publication has suddenly become
extremely lucrative (authors pay for being published, in a move not
different from advertisement), so that hundreds of new journals have
been created, and keep being created (as of march 2013).

Hence this E-seminar is the only ongoing outcome of our effort to
promote Symplectic Biology. After each discussion a summary is
written, sent by E-mail to former participants as well as to persons
interested in the discussion, all over the world, who wish to
participate.

Why subscribe

The "causeries" are meant to be an open forum, but not a chat room or
a general unregulated forum where anybody can attend. In fact, it is
expected that there is some participation of everybody in the
discussion - more like mediaeval disputatii - and we assume
that there is some progress made in the definition of "prospective"
notions (to take the word of John Myhill), coming out from our common
work. For this reason, we must be sure that people connected are
really interested, and that they have a constructive approach to the
discussion. This is why we ask everybody to register, and we discuss
whether we accept any newcomer in the discussion group. It is also
admitted that not all summaries, contents etc will be in English:
multilingual discussions are encouraged... It must also be understood
that, because some may be interested for a while, then no longer
interested, we shall from time to time ask whether participants are
still interested and unregister those who do not answer positively.

Note that a public (copyright)
summary of the causeries is regularly publishes as articles in
peer-reviewed journals. These summaries began with the text of the
comments on the Presocratic philosophers discussed in the early
nineties (in French), as well as a summary of the discussion on the
scientific method (in English, and hopefully, in Chinese when the text
will be available).

Ethics

Science has to be placed in a moral context. It cannot escape ethical
choices.

The novel aspect of Biology, which is described under the name
"Synthetic Biology", but which we prefer to name "Symplectic
Biology" has scientific important consequences, but as a social
practice it needs to answer ethical questions. The main ideas behind
this approach, reconstruction, abstraction, and engineering does not
pose major ethical questions (under the helm of ethics of creation of
knowledge, a typical human activity) until it leads to applications,
that may be the subject of venal exchanges, or of unethical use (such
as warfare or terrorism).

See hearing at the XXXIInd Meeting of the European
Group onEthics in Science and New Technologies (EGE)